Some of the most important and urgent topics requiring economic analysis and policy advice are the problems of climate change and environmental sustainability, and what can be done to alter corporate and individual behaviour to deal with these issues. Neoclassical economists tend to focus on...

Labour 'flexibility' is often portrayed as important to competitive success. Using evidence from an original survey of UK firms, this paper investigates the relationships between firms' use of, on the one hand, various flexible work practices, human resource management techniques, and industrial...

This article estimates the cost of a public investment-led job creation program for the United Kingdom. A program creating an additional one million jobs at the current average wage would involve a net cost to the Treasury dramatically lower than the gross cost; 17 billion pounds worth of...

In 1994 South Africa's first ever democratic elections gave the African National Congress (ANC) an overwhelming majority, with Nelson Mandela as President. This article reviews developments since then. It describes the economy at the beginning of the transition from apartheid, the policy...

For a peace process in Ireland to succeed, it will require an active transition away from the underlying causes of conflict--not just the partition of the country but the inequalities of opportunities and employment between the communities in Northern Ireland. This requires the restructuring of...

Much has been written on the increasingly international generation, transmission, and diffusion of technologies, with the phenomenon having been given its own term--techno-globalism--and interpreted by some as displacing national systems of innovation and making redundant and futile any attempt...

Changes in public policy and corporate strategy have enhanced the role of contracts as mechanisms of economic governance. The understanding that norms, standards, and other forms of regulatory mechanism can affect the structure of incentives and the quality of contractual outcomes has helped to...

The fields of trade, growth and innovation have all increased in importance within the economics literature over the 1980s and 1990s, with one of the key developments being the renewed attempts to integrate the role of technical change into the analysis of trade and economic growth. For too long...

Professor James Tobin's proposal for a tax on foreign exchange transactions is attracting renewed attention in view of its growing revenue potential and concern at the instability of currency markets. This article considers a volume of essays on the possible effects and feasibility of the tax,...